@BobRyan: I agree that there are certain forms of force …

Comment on Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull by Sean Pitman.

@BobRyan:

I agree that there are certain forms of force that would make rebellion against the will of God impossible. If sin were made completely repulsive, if it in no way appeared pleasurable to commit acts of rebellion (i.e., there were always immediate painful reprisals without any experience of pleasure), no one would sin.

However, what is very strange about sin is that, eventually, the sinner comes to a point in sin where death seems more attractive than life. It is like the drug addict who desires another hit from the drug – even at the expense of family, fortune, personal health, and life itself. Ultimate self-destruction is consciously chosen rather than to accept God and the good life that God offers…

The wicked will, ultimately, choose to remain wicked with a “gun to their head”. Knowing that the result of their choice is eminent death, at the end of time, they will still get up off of their knees, after just having acknowledged the righteousness of God, and choose death rather than life.

The insanity of it all is that one will end up hating God, despite knowing that He is in the right, hating life, and loving death. They will choose to pull the trigger of the God and end it all rather than to keep on living…

Satan also knew, ahead of time, in great detail, just where he was wrong. He knew the outcome of his actions. He knew for a fact that he would not “get away with it.” yet, because of his pride, he chose the path of sin anyway… knowing the final outcome.

To argue that sin would only exist in ignorance is to try to excuse sin – to make it less insane than it really is. Sin is possible in the full light of the knowledge that it will result in great injury to one’s self and to others. That is was makes it so insane.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
Consider the following comments from the E.G.. White Estate regarding the origin of disease, suffering and death:

Suffering, other than sickness due to neglect of physical laws, is also caused by Satan and not the deliberate intervention of God. On many occasions she reinforced the teaching of Jesus on this point…

Her teachings regarding the cause of death, as well as suffering, flowed from the big picture of the great controversy between God and Satan:

“It is true that all suffering results from the transgression of God’s law, but this truth had become perverted. Satan, the author of sin and all its results, had led men to look upon disease and death as proceeding from God—as punishment arbitrarily inflicted on account of sin… Sickness, suffering, and death are [the] work of an antagonistic power. Satan is the destroyer; God is the restorer.”

Ellen White, The Desire of Ages, p. 471. and The Ministry of Healing, p. 113

http://www.whiteestate.org/books/mol/Chapt7.html

So, again, neither the Bible nor Mrs. White see diseases, like childhood leukemia, as being the result of a deliberate act or intervention of God…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

Where talking about the ability to detect the need to invoke intelligent design to explain various phenomena that exist in nature – regardless of if the intelligent agent is God or your wife or some alien from Zorg.

The loaves of bread that Jesus made by Divine power were the obvious result of intelligent design. They looked like regular loaves of bread that your wife might make. No one could tell the difference by looking at them if they were placed side-by-side. Yet, one loaf would have been made by God and the other by your wife. The fact is that God can make what humans can make. What would be obvious, however, is that both loaves of bread required intelligence to produce. In other words, they weren’t the product of mindless process of nature or natural laws that had no access to deliberate intelligence.

In short, just because your wife’s intelligence is “natural” doesn’t mean that all natural processes have access to intelligence or that every natural phenomena requires intelligence to explain beyond the basic non-intelligent laws of nature.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

So, you think that if God is directly responsible for the death of anyone that He is therefore the direct cause of all sickness, disease, death, and destruction? Every natural disaster is God’s doing? – a miracle of Divine design and creative power?

Do you not see the difference between the miracle of something like Lazarus being raised from the dead and a tornado wiping out an entire town the other day in the Midwest?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


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